The Last Word

Smiley's People

By LAURA MILLER

Published: June 6, 2004

Spy fiction falls into two categories: the preposterous and the disillusioned. The preposterous is easy enough to identify: an 8-year-old can watch a tuxedoed James Bond striding through a posh casino with a knockout on each arm or water-skiing around the bay of Nice and think that, for a secret agent, this guy is awfully conspicuous. The television series ''Alias'' notwithstanding, you can be pretty sure that gizmos of mass destruction are not always stored in the immediate vicinity of spectacularly glamorous parties.

The disillusioned vein of spy literature, as practiced by such masters as Graham Greene, Charles McCarry and, especially, John le Carré, is celebrated as a corrective to such fantasies. Instead of a cartoon world, like that inhabited by Ian Fleming's suave hero, where the champion of truth, justice and the (very) good life battles a series of freakish masterminds, the disillusioned spy operates in a realm of moral blur, where the ''good'' guys stoop to the same execrable tactics used by the ''bad.'' This is supposed to be a recent advance in verisimilitude, but the disillusioned spy novel has been with us almost as long as the preposterous; le Carré himself has called W. Somerset Maugham, who published ''Ashenden'' in 1928, ''the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.''

But just how realistic is this disenchanted spy fiction, praised for its gritty portrayal of ethical drift and dirty tricks? That is the question asked by ''The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage,'' by Frederick P. Hitz, a retired C.I.A. officer who teaches at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. Hitz based the book on his freshman seminar comparing ''great works of spy fiction'' with ''actual espionage operations.'' His explanation of the difference is somewhat muddled, not least because spies themselves have a hard time distinguishing between the two.

Policemen and private detectives complain that books, television and movies completely distort their professions, ignoring the tedious hours of paperwork and the near-total lack of gunplay. Spies have no such beef. Perhaps that's because the best spy novelists were once spies themselves, including le Carré, Greene, McCarry and even Maugham. This isn't exactly news, but espionage literature's return of the favor is one of the curious facts to be found in ''The Great Game.'' In surveying the cases of several notorious real-life agents, Hitz notes the role reading about spies plays in the making of them. Marine Corps Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree gorged on ''trashy spy novels'' before becoming romantically entangled with a Russian woman and eventually the K.G.B. while stationed as an embassy guard in Moscow. The F.B.I.'s Robert P. Hanssen, who sold United States secrets for 15 years, said he had wanted to be a double agent ever since reading the autobiography of Kim Philby, a member of the traitorous Cambridge Five.

Real-life espionage, Hitz writes, is often ''more bizarre, more deserving of a place in Ripley's than the fictional accounts.'' Le Carré's best-known character, George Smiley, that pudgy, drab, middle-aged man in his ill-fitting suit, has been admired for his workaday authenticity, but the real spies Hitz describes are another beast altogether. The Russians Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky relished taking unnecessary risks, and Penkovsky even came to see his mission as ''divinely blessed.'' The C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames courted exposure by living way beyond his visible means of support. Hanssen was more careful in matters of tradecraft, but indulged in peculiar sexual activities and spent his money on trying to ''rescue'' a stripper.

If anything, the ability to cast oneself as the hero in a romantic yarn seems essential to the spy's life. Something all the double agents Hitz examines have in common is disgruntlement with the system they ostensibly serve. He quotes a C.I.A. psychiatrist who, in studying defectors, ''determined that a common characteristic is self-identification as a 'wronged person who elevates his private dissatisfaction into a political principle.' '' In short, like most people who do bad things, they convince themselves they've got good reasons. Like disguises and cover stories, this, too, is an exercise in storytelling. But unlike their fictional counterparts, real-life double-dealers rarely lose sleep over their betrayals. ''Most real spies appear to have been largely untroubled by the consequences'' of their lies, Hitz writes.

''The Book of Spies,'' a collection of literary espionage edited by Alan Furst and just out in paperback from the Modern Library, is chosen, in Furst's words, from ''the literary end of the spectrum,'' and therefore represents the disillusioned camp almost exclusively. It is rich in the worldly, cynical atmosphere aficionados of spy fiction adore, but because the passages come from novels (apparently, there are no great spy short stories), they leave you craving the long, complicated, twist-filled plots that are the real attraction of the genre.

Maybe the most egregious myth of spy fiction is the way it leads us on with depictions of intelligence agencies as all-knowing puppet masters, setting up webs of deception and using their agents as pawns. Hardly a week goes by without another revelation of an intelligence agency's fallibility and impotence. (Recently, it was Secretary of State Colin Powell admitting on ''Meet the Press'' that the C.I.A. had been misled about Saddam Hussein's weapons capacity. A few days earlier there was the disclosure that the F.B.I. allowed former Nazi war criminals to live in the United States in the vain hope they'd report on Communist activity.) Hitz, in considering le Carré's classic, ''The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,'' observes that when agencies violate agents' trust, it's more often due to ''bureaucratic ineptitude'' than to ''cold calculation.''

In John Banville's ''Untouchable,'' a novel about a spy that isn't really a spy novel, the narrator -- who is based on another Cambridge Five member, Anthony Blunt -- explains why he lied to his case officer. His reasons are novelistic. He needed ''to maintain consistency,'' and ''in order to be consistent it was necessary to invent.'' The real fantasy the spy novel peddles is a dream of coherence and mastery, in which people have the power to transcend human error and the vagaries of chance and to direct the unfolding of fate itself. Even if those people are evil, at least they're people, and not the terrifyingly random forces that, we fear, may truly shape our lives.